The Gender of Silence Part One: Victims and Vengeance
By Sam Moore
There’s one image in horror that’s often associated with silence: killers in slasher films. The most famous of these might be Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise, not just because of his new lease on life from the 2018 sequel/reboot, but because of just how important his silence is to the way his character is understood. Michael is called “pure evil,” and it’s believed that he possesses “the devil’s eyes.” His constant silence all plays into this; in slashers, silence is a harbinger of power, otherworldliness, and impending doom. But there’s another side of the coin when it comes to silence in horror - the silence of women. The continued return to the idea of female silence in horror is revealing when it comes to not only the anxieties that the films explore, but also the relationship that women have with horror.
This relationship can be divided into two camps: one of victimhood, and, in later horror, a strand where the silence - metaphorical or literal - of female characters becomes a way for them to usher in change; the trajectory from older horror films to more contemporary ones carries with it the development of female agency. This earlier silence both predates, and runs alongside the association of silence with otherworldly violence in slashers.
Often, these silent female characters are seen as being a kind of empty slate, as if by being unable to speak, they’re lacking something fundamental, with speech being treated as the way in which people can generate agency. In The Spiral Staircase (1946), a serial killer is hunting women hedeems to have “afflictions,” which the film goes on to define as an almost existential lack. The language in the script speaks to the treatment of women - the victims are never given names; when they’re recounted, they’re called “the girl with the scar on her face, then that poor, simple creature, and now this cripple.” The Spiral Staircase is driven by the attempts of the mute Helen (Dorothy McGuire) to survive as she becomes the killer’s next target.
There’s one scene in The Spiral Staircase that ends up being echoed decades later in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. Taken in tandem, these two scenes illustrate one of the common threads being pulled at by silent women; as a town doctor takes Helen home in Spiral Staircase, he treats her silence as an invitation to talk at her without interruption. There’s a similar scene to this in Ms. 45, when Thana (Zoe Lund), is accosted by a man on the street, asking her what’s wrong, and then continues to talk when he doesn’t get an answer. Thana’s loudmouth friends offer a counterpoint to this; when they tell men to shut the fuck up, the men listen.
It’s this dynamic between the power of a voice, and the weakness in silence, that creates narratives of victimhood around women in horror. One of Thana’s attackers orders her not to make a sound, while another tries to force her to - there are similar scenes with Helen in The Spiral Staircase. Silence isn’t just about being unable to talk, but having your voice become something that can be taken from you, controlled, abused. That’s one of the things that so often makes these women written as victims: the need to scream would save them if only they could do it. In peak William Castle fashion, there’s a mute in The Tingler (1959), a film where screaming can literally save your life. These narratives of victimhood, while rooted in female silence, wouldn’t exist without the use of certain tropes about maleness and power, from the authoritative doctors, and shadow of spousal abuse in The Tingler, to the perverse undertones in the interactions that Thana has with her boss, a man who insists “there’s no sense in being shy with a face like that.” This is what makes the male silence of figures like Michael or Jason in slashers such an interesting counterpoint; the ways in which silence is treated as a gendered construct in horror: male silence is power and inevitability, where female silence is weakness, a blank slate to be written over, and overpowered.
What drives these films on a level beyond plot is the fight for agency that these characters have. There’s a fascinating dream sequence in The Spiral Staircase where Helen’s silence stops her from being able to marry someone. One of the unifiers for all of these women is the fact that they’re seen as “abnormal.” This is challenged in the final act of Ms. 45, where the silence of the title character takes on a new role: as Thana begins to become a kind of avatar of vengeance, a bloodstained visage fighting for twisted agency.
While it isn’t a horror film, Bergman’s Persona (1966) acts as a fascinating bridge between older horror films like The Spiral Staircase and Ms. 45, and more contemporary ones like the Quiet Place diptych. In Persona, there are two important differences in how silence functions: firstly, it exists without being under the shadow of maleness, and secondly, it’s a conscious choice. Here, silence is a literal act of agency, rather than being symbolic for a lack of it - this could create an interesting dynamic in a film like Ms. 45, if she were to choose silence and use it as a way to reclaim the power and agency that was taken away from her through violence. Instead, these older horror films use silence alongside violence, a way of illustrating how pervasive it can be.
This idea of victimhood being rooted in silence gets a strange confirmation from the end of The Spiral Staircase, where Helen literally gets her voice back and screams for her life. It’s mirrored in the victimhood in The Tingler, it isn’t silence itself that’s inherently weak. With the final act of Ms. 45 beginning to challenge these notions, but instead the ways in which silence is perceived in relation to gender politics, with more contemporary films challenging not only these politics, but the possibilities and power that can be found without saying a word...
The Gender of Silence Part 2 will be out on the 14th of July
Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. Their work has been published by the LA Review of Books, i-D, the BFI, and other places. They are one of the founding editors of Third Way Press. Their first book, All my teachers died of AIDS, was published by Pilot Press in 2020
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